The Skill of Our Hands--A Novel

by Steven Brust

  But the death of a Second is still the death of a Second; it affected them all. And Jimmy wouldn’t run through Phil’s seeds as if he were scanning his contact list for someone’s phone number. He should concentrate on this Second, on Chuck, but—

  Wait.

  “Fuck ritual. Fuck tradition.” That’s what Phil had told him once, and Ren both needed and deserved to know him, to see who he was. Ren, of all of them, had never known Phil in any previous Second, and Jimmy knew she suffered the absence of her Celeste-stolen memories like a constant badge, an invisible scarlet “O” for outsider. He’d seen it again today, when she’d had to learn from him about countermeddling. So yes, traditions said you use the most recent Second to find the memory for the dust ritual. But fuck tradition and fuck ritual. Jimmy would search as long as he needed to, and if the seed he found to show Ren more of the man she loved was of an older Second, then so be it.

  Jimmy spent a long time there, amid an inferno, eating pears and plums, smelling roses, watching waterfalls and mountain storms, until an ocean wave crashing into a cliff drenched him in a memory that made him go, “Oh, yes. Of course.”

  JULY, 1857

  “OLD JOHN BROWN, WHOSE SOUL IS MARCHING ON?”

  I met with Brown on one of his trips into Lawrence. We were on Massachusetts Street, just opposite the site of the old Free State Hotel, which the Eldridge brothers were in the middle of rebuilding. I studied him, his deep-set eyes, low forehead, mouth permanently set in a frown of righteous fury. In spite of my efforts to befriend him, he’d always been cool toward me—by which I mean that he was willing to talk, but not so much inclined to listen. I think he realized I didn’t approve of violence, and so he figured I wasn’t as committed to the cause as I should be.

  It was like trying to meddle with a brick wall. He ate some of the poppyseed cake I’d made, and I hummed “Thy Bountiful Care” under my breath, and I had the coffee smeared on my flannel shirt, and I might as well not have bothered. We exchanged a few words; I spoke of the Lecompton Constitution, he spoke of the plight of the slaves. I opined that we, in Kansas, had the chance to unite the whole North behind us, and he declared that every man who owned a slave deserved to be hanged.

  He wouldn’t tell me what he was going to do, but he was determined to do it, and nothing I could say would change that. I tried to get at least a hint as to what he had in mind, but nothing. My best guess was more raids into Missouri to free slaves, but something about the way he held himself told me he had bigger thoughts, bigger plans.

  Leaving me with the eternal question: Now what?

  * * *

  Phil asks that question more often than he should, but even I wouldn’t have known what to do with Brown. Besides join him, that is.

  —Oskar

  * * *

  ELEVEN

  How We Fight Is As Important

  “She shouldn’t be here.” A tall, attractive man appeared between the library shelves like Samson at the temple’s pillars.

  Irina twisted her head up for a better look at him. “Hiya,” she said.

  He regarded her with all the warmth he’d show Delilah. “Want me to put her outside?” he asked Sam.

  “Throw me over your shoulder and I’ll puke down your back,” Irina promised.

  “It’s okay,” Sam said although it was perfectly clear that nothing was okay in his world. “Irina, this is Frio. Frio, this is Irina. She’s a friend of Jane’s.”

  “I’m not, actually. I was a friend of Phil’s, the guy who got shot down here yesterday,” Irina said.

  Frio took a step toward his boss, and stopped himself with feline balance, indifferent to Phil’s death itself, deeply concerned with its effect on Sam. Inordinately so.

  If Irina was right about Sam being who she thought he was and doing what she thought Phil had been doing, Officer Jack Harris had bigger problems than he knew.

  Sam, still sitting on the floor, his back against a shelf, looked up at his subordinate like he expected to have to shoulder the weight of all the books behind him when he stood. He just shook his head and looked back down at his hands, limp in his lap, still holding his car keys.

  “Sam, were you headed to Phil and Ren’s house to see Jane?”

  He nodded.

  “Come on,” the big guy said, reaching for Irina’s arm. “Let’s go.”

  “It’s okay,” Sam said again, no more convincingly, but it stopped his enforcer, who straightened, clearly uncomfortable with standing while Sam sat, but with no excuse to get on the ground, and nothing he could do about Irina except scowl.

  “Could you give me a lift?” Irina gingerly touched the bruised place on her jaw, keeping her focus on Sam. “They’re expecting me too.”

  “Sure,” Sam said.

  “We don’t know her.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I’ll drive.” The big guy reached down and took the keys from Sam’s unprotesting hand. “I’ll bring the car around front, load you both in quick.”

  Sam just nodded, and Irina shifted to a more comfortable position against one of the bookcase’s vertical supports. Frio turned on his heel with an almost military repressed anger, startling a homeless woman who’d been napping at a study table. She whirled to her feet like a heap of blown leaves, and Irina watched the powerfully built man, frustrated as he’d been, catch the poor thing by her shoulders and gently re-seat her.

  “You’re afraid that whoever killed Phil is still hunting rabble-rousers,” Irina said.

  Sam nodded.

  “And your ‘we’ has roused a bit of rabble.”

  Sam just shrugged.

  “That ‘we’ includes, at the very least, you—a high school civics teacher, and Santi—one of your students?”

  Sam nodded.

  “Who had you for Russian history?” Irina guessed. “No,” she quickly corrected, reading Sam’s face, “for something broader. A topics class. A unit on revolutions? No, revolt. Serfs, Slaves, and Insurgents, something like that?”

  Sam’s smile was bitter. Behind him, the homeless woman lurched from her table and limped toward the john.

  “Interesting,” Irina mused, which wasn’t really the word. She’d been a serf and a slave, run revolutionary and rebel, and she doubtless would again. In fact, she’d been feeling pretty damn insurgent quite recently, but not right now. Right now, she was investigating, not inciting. “So you, Santi, and the Army guy.”

  “Frio?” Sam asked. “He’s not Army.”

  “You, Santi, and Frio—any others?”

  Sam nodded again, but Irina decided not to push for more names or a number. Sam was the type to protect information about his people over anything else, no matter what. Like she was.

  “And you’re up to something dangerous and illegal. Something anti-authoritarian.” That much was obvious from what he taught and who he was working with.

  The rest—that Sam was the guy who’d been giving the local police and federal enforcers such fits, who’d been behind the sabotaged immigration raids, who’d protected the water drops in the desert—surprised Irina as much as it would surprise Sam that she knew about them. All the local news outfits had been silent on the subject. All except Menzie’s, anyway.

  Sam was not at all what Irina had been imagining, but of course she’d been imagining Phil. Well, she’d been wrong before. For example, she thought she’d come down here hunting Phil’s killer, but found his new Second instead. Frio was better than Oskar or Phil, or both put together, as far as change agents went. He reminded her of a one-armed man she’d known even before she took the spike the first time—a man she’d loved and watched burn on the public square of Cap Françaison.

  “Sam,” Irina asked him, “do you know what the difference is between a revolt and a revolution?”

  “No.”

  “Nobody does,” she said. “Not going into one anyway.”

  * * *

  I do. Revolt is movement against. Revolution moves things forward, creates some
thing new.

  —Oskar

  * * *

  * * *

  Jimmy recalled, in 1977 Phil was living in Pittsburgh. He traveled to Texas a lot for poker games in what he half-jokingly called “The Negro Poker League,” and he had picked Jimmy up at the airport in a 1966 Shelby Mustang that had seen better days. Jimmy had known it was a 1966 Shelby Mustang because three years earlier, the last time he had visited the States, Phil had mentioned it five times in a five-kilometer drive.

  But in 1977, neither Phil nor Jimmy spoke during the drive. In his current Second, Phil was husky and about forty, his short hair prematurely gray. His apartment building looked like it was ready to slide into the Allegheny River, but inside it was clean and spare, if hot. Phil put some Louis Armstrong on the stereo, and Jimmy listened to it with him as the others arrived. Jimmy wasn’t sure if the coronet was laughing or crying or both—maybe that was the point. It reminded him of this New World he found himself in, harsh and unforgiving and vital, and always moving forward—the dynamics building incrementally. He looked at Phil, but didn’t say anything.

  Irina was the last to get there. Once she was seated, Phil took the record off and carefully returned the album to its spot. When everyone had something to drink, Ramon spoke. “I assume we all know by now that Sophal has been stubbed?”

  There were nods from around the room.

  Ramon continued, “I’ve been in touch with Ahn Hoang, but it will take her some time. And until we know more, and can decide what to do, we don’t know if we can risk another recruit in Phnom Pehn, much less ask her to travel there.”

  There were more nods from around the room, and, after a moment, Ramon continued. “To be clear, we’re here to decide whether there’s anything we can do about this situation, and, if so, how to go about it. We aren’t here to beat ourselves up about what’s past.”

  “I think, dear Dewey,” said Celeste, “that it is worth taking some time to see how the mistakes were made so they might be avoided moving forward, unless, perchance, I’m the only one here interested in the avoidance of future calamity, in which case I will let the matter drop out of courtesy if not conviction.”

  Jimmy adored Celeste, but he had to admit that sometimes she irritated him. He was the newest member of Salt, and still felt he should listen more than speak. But then Irina fell into Celeste’s trap and went into a monologue about how, if she hadn’t been in stub when the decisions were made she would have had things to say, and Ramon, contradicting himself, said it was important they get what lessons they could out of it.

  Jimmy was perfectly aware of what Celeste was doing: she was saying, “I told you so,” in as subtle and indirect a manner as she could. And she was right, she had told them to stay out of things in Cambodia; but that wasn’t helpful for dealing with the guilt, or for figuring out what had gone wrong, or deciding if they could do anything useful, and before he had really decided to, Jimmy had said, “If the only available lesson, Celeste, is that next time we should listen to you and not get involved, I’ve had a long and tiring plane flight for nothing.”

  And that had done it. They were off, screaming, shouting, gesticulating, and getting nowhere. Eventually, after about two hours, there was a lull in the conversation (no pun intended, Ramon). While everyone gathered up energy to start in again, Phil cleared his throat. He hadn’t said a word the entire time. “There’s a place that will deliver pizza here,” he said. “And they have decent pasta, Celeste. Howard wired me some money for the meeting, so I’ll pick up the check.”

  An hour later, they had quieted down, and were munching away (the pizza was surprisingly good, Jimmy remembered, the sauce wonderfully heavy on oregano), and while they all ate, Phil talked.

  “We will never get over this,” he said in a voice almost too low to hear. “This will leave scars on us for at least as long as I’ve been alive. We were wrong, and that brings into question everything we’ve ever done, and makes us doubt the very value of our existence. That is as it should be. Whatever our exact role in this, each of us needs to wear those scars. Each of us,” he repeated, with a sharp glance at Celeste, who had opened her mouth to speak.

  “To imagine that we can proceed as we have been after this is lunacy. To imagine that our whole existence is a mistake is cynicism. Whether we want to or not, for a while we’re going to be afraid to do things. We need to accept that. We need to feel this doubt. We deserve to feel this pain.

  “And then we need to go on.

  “Not because of how we feel, but because the amnemones still need us, and we can still help them, and at the end of the day, how we feel about it—our guilt, our terror, our hesitation—just doesn’t matter. The amnemones matter. Our meddlework matters. Making things better matters.

  “Ray suggests that we’re here to see if we can do anything about Cambodia now, and I don’t disagree. We have to talk about that, and decide. But the most important thing is simply that, first, we recognize that for a while we’re going to feel like wounded animals, and second, that we recognize that we have a duty to overcome that feeling and get on with our work.

  “Because that’s the only way we can even begin to make up for what we did.”

  Phil went back to eating his pizza, but even Celeste had been cowed into silence. The meeting lasted two more days, with only minimal shouting, and it accomplished a great deal.

  In his castle Garden, Jimmy’s fire returned to the fireplace, and went out. Jimmy sat for just a few more minutes before returning to Ren and Phil’s house in the real world, where he already knew he was crying.

  * * *

  Kate gave Daniel enough information to drown a weaker man, then dropped him off in front of the hotel where a grateful city had paid ahead for two weeks in a modest suite. “Now what?” he asked her.

  “Now, you think about it. Then, when you’re ready, maybe tomorrow, maybe next week, we get together, and I’ll make you believe the make-believe. You’ll come over to my house. It’ll take a full day. I’ll show you the Garden, what a stub looks like, and how we do what we do. We’ll talk, you’ll have dinner with the fam. Then you go away and think about it some more, and decide if you want to close your eyes and jump.”

  “Yeah,” Daniel had said, no doubt trying to imagine, even if it were all real, risking his life in a fifty-fifty shot at everything Kate had told him about. She knew he couldn’t imagine doing it. “Okay,” he’d said. “I’ll think about it.”

  Kate smiled at him, waving good-bye from the minivan, and pulled into traffic. Poor kid. It was a lot to sort through. Of course, he would be convinced it was crazy. He would think he’d just wasted several hours talking to a woman who was clearly certifiable. She could almost hear him talking to himself. And she’s a doctor. Healthcare is hosed.

  She’d read it all in his broad forehead and nervous hands. He’d think about it, and he’d pace—and only partially because his legs hurt. Pacing wouldn’t reduce the pain, but sitting still made it worse. Kate couldn’t explain it. She had given him a supply of big white pills, but he wouldn’t take one. He would want his head clear.

  Would he believe her? Would he take the gamble?

  No. That wasn’t the question. Of course he’d take the gamble. If he thought it was real. If he thought the Incrementalists really could offer a shot at immortality, or close to it, where every day he could go to bed knowing things were just a bit less messed up because of him. He wouldn’t say no to that. If the odds were one in twenty, rather than fifty-fifty, he still wouldn’t.

  So the question was just: did he believe her?

  Her phone rang. Digging it out of her bag, she nearly ran into a mail truck.

  “I’m no fucking hero!” Daniel’s voice, still raspy from the smoke damage, sounded choked with something harder. “A hero wouldn’t have stood there, scared, while people died.”

  “Daniel—”

  “I’m not how you see me. I’m not as good as that. I’m really selfish sometimes. I get really scared. What
if I sign up with you for all the wrong reasons? What if I end up making things worse?”

  Confusion and upset were a normal part of the process, but Kate hated hearing the torment in Dan’s damaged voice. “I’m coming back to get you.”

  “Kate?”

  “I’m making a U-ey.”

  “It’s tempting enough to make a person selfish anyway. I mean, immortality? Except it isn’t, exactly. It’s transferring memories from one person to another, and is that even possible? Hell, I don’t know enough to say it isn’t. But, from a dead person? Well, yeah. I mean, if it can be done at all, that means that memories can be stored, and if they can be stored, it doesn’t matter if the original source is dead. But the whole thing—it’s nuts. You’re nuts!”

  “I’m almost back to you.”

  “You’re a nut job! Except that you’re a nut job who did stuff to me based on knowing things no one could know. And a nut job who has a way of making the preposterous seem mundane, and making the mundane seem magic.” His breath came over the phone, then, “I’m not magic, Kate.” It was an ugly scraped whisper. “I’m kind of a loser.”

  “Come downstairs, Daniel.”

  He was waiting for her when Kate rolled the minivan up to the valet station. They looked sniffy, but Dan yanked open the passenger door and stood there, looking in. “You said you’d convince me it’s all real.”

  “Yes.”

  “You said the guy who died—”

  “Phil.”

  “You said he was recruited because of helping in a fire, only it was a car fire.”

  “His most recent Second, yes. Daniel, the valets are showing signs of coronary stress at the state of my van. Can you get in and we’ll go just around the corner?”

  “You said he didn’t get burned in the fire.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But it was enough to show he was willing to give something up, or at least risk something, for strangers. That’s what you’re looking for.”